 Bryan Cohen of "Selling For Authors". I watched a very interesting webinar recently, about using keywords to improve sales on Amazon (and other retailing websites). I can’t provide a link to it, because it expired on 2nd July, but it was created by Bryan Cohen, owner of the Selling For Authors website. Bryan provides training for authors who need help marketing their books and he has also published a number of books on the subject, some of which have been reviewed on this blog page. We’re big fans of Bryan because he has helped us to increase our sales. So, with the webinar no longer being available, we thought we would tell you about some of the things we learnt from it.  Basically, the webinar was about “Search Engine Optimisation”, aka SEO. But rather than being about using SEO techniques to help people find your website (you may not even have one), it is about helping readers to find your books on whichever websites you sell them. Although I will be talking almost exclusively about KDP and Amazon, the same techniques can be used for whichever websites you use to publish and sell your books. The secret is keywords. Those are the seven words you are able to input into the metadata for your book when you upload it onto KDP.  Metadata, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is the stuff you enter in the first part of the KDP process: Book title, author name, blurb, etc. That is all copied across to other versions of the book, such as paperbacks and some of it also appears on the Amazon sales page. But from the point of view of this blog, I’ll be talking about keywords and subtitles which are a very important part of the metadata.. Now, I’ve already said KDP allows you to enter 7 key words for your book. That is misleading, because you can actually enter whole phrases. If you enter 7 phrases of five words each, that’s 35 words you actually use. The critical thing is, the closer you can match those phrases to the ones people use when they search for books on-line, the higher your book will appear in the search results.  If you use a generic term in your keywords, such as Sci-fi, then it generates thousands of results, and your book will be hidden away in amongst all the others. But if you get an exact match on a longer phrase, the only books that will appear higher in the results are those which have been “sponsored” (paid for adverts) and other books with keywords that are an exact match for the same search term. A book that hasn’t sold a copy since Adam was a lad can appear on the first page of the search results if the right keywords have been used. And experience shows that a book that appears on the first page of search results has a far higher chance of being purchased than one that appears on the subsequent pages. Bryan advises us that there is a process for finding the right keyword phrases to use. Trying to short-cut that process is likely to give disappointing results, so you are advised to set some time aside for this activity. 2 to 3 hours should be enough for a single book.  If you can’t spare 3 hours out of your busy schedule to sell your books, then you will never sell any books. The first thing to do is to think what your book is actually about in the simplest terms. This is not about writing a synopsis or even a back cover blurb. This is about finding a few words that describe it in the most basic form. So, let’s say your book's genre is sci-fi.
Having decided what sort of book you have written, you now need to brainstorm some phrases that might be put into a search bar by someone who is looking for books like yours, eg Sci-fi set in space but including time travel. Why do you need more than one phrase? Because this isn’t an exact science. We don’t yet know which words are going to provide the best results, so we are indulging in trial and error. This is why you need to set time aside to do this.  The next step is to try the phrases out in Amazon’s search bar to see what sort of results they generate. Use “incognito browsing” for this, so Amazon doesn’t show you your own books, because you are looking to see what results are produced for successful books (I’ll define successful a bit better in a moment). Having entered your first phrase, take a look at the results. Ignore the ones that have been sponsored and also ignore any books that are being offered for free, because you don’t know if they are popular because readers like them or because the readers just want a free book. Click on the book that is highest in the results (after excluding sponsored and free) and read the blurb. Is it like yours in basic terms? If no, then the phrase you have used isn’t producing the correct results and you can discard it. If yes, you can now scroll down to the book’s details and look at the sales rankings. This is where you consider if the book is successful or not.  If the book’s overall sales ranking is better than 50,000 it is probably selling reasonably well. But also look at its rankings within its categories. If they are looking pretty good (better than 5,000), then that confirms your initial feelings. But are they the same categories that you have selected for your book? Because that is an important factor too. If they aren’t you can change your categories in KDP later, because if their book is selling well in those categories, yours have a good chance too if they are similar. Don’t bother with books that have a sales ranking worse than 500,000. They aren’t selling enough copies, which means that the keywords you used aren’t going to sell you many books because the results aren’t producing what the readers are looking for. Also don’t try to compete with the books that are at the top of the rankings. They are probably being written by well-known authors, which means you stand little chance of your book being selected as the one to buy. You are looking for the “mid-range” results that will sell you around 10 copies a day. If you get momentum from that you will climb the sales rankings naturally and you may end up competing with the bestselling authors that way, which is a happy place to be.  Repeat this process until you have 2 or 3 phrases that are producing the sorts of search results you were hoping for. Now go to KDP and enter those phrases into the keyword boxes, replacing any keywords that you feel probably aren’t working for you. If you use “Publisher Rocket” (we do) these will be easier to identify. Finally, the hardest part of all – be patient. If you have chosen the right keywords, sales will come, and they will be better than the sales you have had before. If you don’t have the success you expected after about a month, then repeat the process, generating new phrases to try. Don’t try to change all 7 keywords in one go. You won’t know which ones are working and which aren’t, and you may delete keywords that were selling you a few books before you tried this. If your sales are worse than they were before you started then not only are your new phrases not working for you, but you may have deleted useful keywords and you need to reinstate them.  Now, before we go on to talk about subtitles, just a word about the section of the metadata that asks you if the book contains “adult” content. Amazon isn’t too clear on what adult content is and what it isn’t. Accordingly, Bryan Cohen advises that you click on “no” for that question. If you write books that are erotic, contain a lot of extreme violence or lots of strong swear words, then maybe you should click the “yes” option. But otherwise, your books may end up in the adults only dungeon (Bryan’s words) and not be seen by a lot of potential readers. Ask yourself this: “Would I be happy with my 14 year old child reading this book?” If the answer is yes, then no harm will come from clicking the “no” button as children below that age tend not to buy books, their parents do the buying so let them make the decision. Now, subtitles.  We hadn’t thought about these too much in the past and hardly ever use them, but it turns out we should have. Using a subtitle allows you to have an 8th keyword phrase in your metadata that Amazon can find when people do searches. Naturally, as the subtitle appears on the book’s sales page it needs to be grammatically correct, but it can be used to provide guidance to the reader about the book’s content, which may not be apparent from the title. For example, one of our sci-fi titles is called “The Magi”. For some readers that could be interpreted (despite the cover showing an image of a spaceship) as being a book about the Three Wise Men who visited Jesus in Bethlehem. But by adding a subtitle that says “A sci-fi action adventure” we are describing the book in a way that can’t be misinterpreted. Subtitles like that can be used for any book written in any genre. Again, using trial and error, generate some potential subtitles and put them into Amazon’s search bar and see what results they produce. If they give you a list of books that use the same or similar subtitle, which the blurb tells you are the same sort of books that you write and which have reasonable sales rankings, then you are onto a winner. If your books have been organised into a series on KDP, as they should be if they are a series, then don’t use the series title in your subtitle. That will appear in search results if a reader uses the series title as a search term. The series title appears on the sales page anyway so you will be duplicating the wording and that looks amateurish. You don’t have to include your subtitle on your book cover. If you use KDP’s cover creator, it will pull the subtitle through from the metadata if there has been no previous cover created, but you can delete it from the cover if you want to. If you designed your own cover, you don’t have to change it to include the subtitle. Just a note about paperbacks (and hardbacks). Once these have been published you can’t go back later and add a subtitle. However, if a search throws up your ebook, then the other buying options will also be shown on the sales page so readers will see that there is a hard copy option if they want it.  I have tried to cram into less than 10 minutes of reading what Bryan took an hour to say in his webinar, but of course he went into a lot more detail. So, if you want to know more, I suggest you contact Bryan through his website.
As well as selling training he also runs regular “author challenges” where he provides coaching for free, so you may care to sign up for one of those in order to expand on what we have discussed here. If you have enjoyed this blog, or found it informative, then make sure you don’t miss future editions. Just click on the button below to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll even send you a free ebook for doing so.
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